LESSON 3

HUMANISTIC COUNSELING THEORIES

Existential Therapy of Victor Frankl and Rollo May

View of Human Nature

 Main focus deals with human existence and what it means to be alive
 To be human means asking questions about our very existence
 Searching for meaning in life is a distinctly human characteristic
 Our validation must come form within rather than from others
 People create their own values. People are free when they choose
freely and when they accept the consequences of their actions.
 Individuals define who they are by their choices even though there may
be factors beyond one’s control that restrict one’s choices
 Ontological experience, the science of “being”
 Basic concept: “being in the world”
 Umwelt: physical; Mitwelt: Social
 Eigenwelt: Psychological or self-knowing
 Uberwelt: Spiritual
 Therapists may help clients recognize outmoded ways of life and
become willing to take the responsibility to change, to expand, and to
find meaning in their lives that is unique to them.
 Individuals define who they are by their choices even though there may
be factors beyond one’s control that restrict one’s choices
 Ontological experience, the science of “being”
 Basic concept: “being in the world”
o Umwelt: physical; Mitwelt: Social
o Eigenwelt: Psychological or self-knowing
o Uberwelt: Spiritual
 Therapists may help clients recognize outmoded ways of life and
become willing to take the responsibility to change, to expand, and to
find meaning in their lives that is unique to them.
 Levels of Being the World:
o Umwelt (Biological/Physical World): living cycles of organisms such
as sleep patterns, drives, instincts
o Milwelt (Social World): refers to existence as influenced by our
social relationships
o Eigenwelt (Self-Knowing/Psychological experience): refers to our own
individual world, represents an attempt to understand
ourselves; consists of our awareness, introspection and self-
knowing
o Uberwelt (Spiritual World): refers to the spiritual world of being;
people relate to the unknown and create a sense of an ideal
world, as well as philosophical outlook on that world. It often
leads to people finding something for which they are willing to
live or die.

Goals of Therapy
 Finding personal meaning: the client is encouraged to find his or her
own personal meanings and truths about life.
  Taking responsibility for one’s decisions about living.
 Living in the present so that the client experiences life more fully each
moment.
 Increasing self-awareness and authentic living
Role of Therapist
 Facilitate client’s encounters with themselves
 Focus on the issue of client responsibility
 Assist clients in learning how to embrace responsibility rather than
avoid it
 Assists clients in making choices, removing the obstacles that block
their decision-making ability, and understanding the methods they use
in arriving at decisions.
Therapy Techniques
 Free to use techniques across the broad schools of thought, including diverse
techniques such as desensitization and free association
o Primary guideline: address the uniqueness of each person
o Initial Phase: help clients identify and clarify their beliefs about
their worlds. Clients are encouraged to explore the ways in
which
they make sense of their being
o Middle Phase: examines clients’ values and their sources
o Final Phase: focuses on helping clients take action regarding the
kind of life they want.
Logotherapy
 3 Basic Assumptions:
o Life has meaning under all circumstances
o People have a will to meaning
o People have the freedom under all circumstances to activate
the will to meaning and to find meaning in life
 Techniques:
o Socratic Dialogue:
 Conversational method used to raise clients’
consciousness about their possibilities
 Therapist asks specific questions to raise into
consciousness the possibility to find, and the freedom to
fulfill, meaning in one’s life
o Paradoxical Intention
 Directs a client to do something contrary one’s actual
intentions
o Labeled Dereflection
 People encounter problems because they put too much
emphasis on themselves
 When people shift their attention to others, their own
personal problems seem to lessen
 

Gestalt Therapy by Frits Perls

Contribution of Gestalt Psychology to Gestalt Therapy

 An individual’s behavior is a Gestalt, a whole that is greater than the
sum
of its parts.
 An individual experiences the world according to the principles of a
figure-ground relationship.
 An individual will seek closure of an incomplete gestalt. An incomplete
gestalt draws an individual attention until it is unified and stabilized
 An individual will complete gestalts on the basis of his or her most
prevalent need
 A person’s behavior can be most meaningfully understood only in its
immediate context.

Gestalt Counseling
 A therapeutic approach in which the therapist assist the client toward
self-integration and toward learning to utilize his energy in appropriate
ways to grow, develop, and actualize
 Primary focus: here and now
 Major objective: integration of the person/ “getting it all together”
 Therapist seeks to increase the client’s awareness
 Client must also learn to take responsibility for themselves

Framework of Gestalt
 Individuals are composite wholes made up of interrelated parts
 Individuals are also part of their own environment and cannot be understood apart
from it
 People choose how they respond to external and internal stimuli. They are actors,
nor reactors
 People have the potential to be fully aware of all their sensations, thoughts, emotions,
and perceptions
 Individuals are capable of making choices because they are aware
 Individuals have the capacity to govern their own lives effectively
 People cannot experience the past and the future. They can only
experience themselves in the present
  People are neither basically good nor bad.

Emphasis on the “Now”

 E.g “what are you doing now?”
 Avoids the why or cause questions
 Emphasize the Eigenwelt ( the relation to oneself) rather than the past.
 “lose your mind and come to your senses”

The Therapeutic Process

 Highly verbal and experiential
 Therapy focuses on what is happening in the moment-to-moment therapeutic process
rather than on what is being discussed (the content).
 Therapist is highly intuitive and can be compared to an artist
 Clients become aware of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what they
need to do to bring about desired change

Here-and-Now Principles
 Live now; stay in the present.
 Live here; be with the present.
 Stop imagining; experience reality.
 Stop unnecessary thinking.
 Expressing rather than manipulating, explaining, justifying, or judging.
 Do not restrict your awareness; give in to your awareness of unpleasantness.
 Accept no “should” or “ought” other than your own.
 Take full responsibility for your own actions, feelings, and thoughts.
 Surrender to being who you are right now.

Gestalt Rules for Therapists

 1. The principle of Now: always use the present tense and deal with life in the present
rather than in the past.
 2. The use of I instead of It : helps clients substitute personal pronouns (take
responsibility for feelings) for impersonal ones.
 3. Focusing on how and what rather than why : gestalt therapists maintain that when
clinicians ask why questions, they are requesting a rationale/excuse from clients.
 4. The conversion of questions to statements : People sometimes hide behind their
questions. Gestalt clinicians ask clients to change their questions into statements
 5. Paying attention to client’s language pattern s: a client’s language can both
describe and conceal. Eg. Perhaps, sort of, possibly, I can vs I won’t
 6. Listening to clients metaphors: you learn about their internal and external
struggles. The therapist translates the meaning of these metaphors into manifest
content so that it can be dealt with in therapy

Techniques
 1. The Hot Seat
o Designed to bring about greater self-awareness among clients who are
usually in a group setting
 o Members are told that anyone who wants to work may sit in a chair facing
the leader
o The person who decides to sit in the chair is told to begin by stating a
specific life problem
o 10-30 minutes or until the individual or the leader feel closure has been
reached
 2. Now and How
o NOW refers to a person’s immediate awareness of experiencing.
E.g. “Now I am feeling like a hopeless child, still clinging to my mother’s
apron’s string”.
o HOW refers to a person’s description of the manner in which certain feelings
are experienced. E.g. “What are the sensations you experience when you feel
like a child, clinging to your mother’s apron’s string?”
 3. Top dog and Underdog Introjections
o Refers to the process by which people take into themselves aspects of other
people, especially their parents.
o There may be a split between what they want to do and what they feel they
should do. “should” introjections is known as topdog, it is equivalent to
superego. E.g “if you don’t act like a good girl, then you’ll be called cheap
trash, and nobody will ever respect you.”
o Underdog attempts to control top dog by reacting defensively, apologizing
and playing the role of “nobody likes me”. Clients who operate from the
underdog position are usually passive aggressive, make excuses for
behavior, and have countless reasons for delay. Those who play underdog
have great resentment toward those whom they consider their top dog
 4. Dreamwork
o ‘messages” that reflect a client’s place at a certain time.
o Clients present dreams and then the therapist directs them to experience
what it is like to be each part of the dream
o The goal is to bring dreams back to life and to relive them as if they were
happening now
o Clients with repetitive dreams are encouraged to understand that unfinished
business is being brought into awareness and that there is a need to take
care of the message the dream delivered.
 5. Making the Rounds
o Used primarily in groups; confrontation is at its height
o E.g. ‘I hate everyone in this room”; therapist: “Make that statement to each
person here, and in doing so, express your feelings about each person.”
“Why are you in touch within this group?”
 6. Role Reversal
o May be used in group or individual therapy
o Used to help clients understand that their overt behavior may represent the
opposite of their latent impulses
o A client may be asked to role-play a specific feeling or behavior that seems
the opposite of what he or she wants.
 7. Homework
o Might entail having clients write dialogues between parts of themselves or
between the parts of their bodies.
  8. Rehearsal
o Clients can gain awareness of how much time they use preparing to play
their social roles or the effort required when they are trying to be something
other than what they are.
o Rehearsal permits practice and modeling of desirable behaviors, especially
in situations that provoke in clients strong avoidance anxiety
 9. Exaggeration
o Requires clients to accentuate behavior or gestures of which they may only
be mildly aware
o Exaggeration of body language, including gestures, tone of voice, posture,
and facial expressions, can promote clients’ awareness of incongruences
between their verbal messages and their nonverbal communications.
 10. Withdrawal
o Individual’s right to withdraw from contact and from therapy.
o It symbolizes the organismic regulation of the person; people decide for
themselves whether they want to be left alone or in contact with other people
o Helps a participant withdraw psychologically from a group if that individual
indicates he or she wants to do so.
o E.g. “try to relax and imagine that you are going to leave this group.” What
are you experiencing now? Can you try to put yourself into what you are
experiencing now?”

Person-Centered theory/Client-centered theory of Carl Rogers

Characteristics of Human Infants

 Whatever an infant perceives becomes that infant’s reality. An infant’s
perception is an internal process about which only he or she can be
aware
 All infants are born with a self-actualizing tendency that is satisfied by
their subsequent goal-directed behavior
 An infant’s interaction with the environment is an organized whole, and
everything he or she does is interrelated.
 An infant’s experiences may be viewed as positive or negative
depending on the extent to which they enhance his or her
actualization tendency
 Infants maintain experiences that are actualizing, and they avoid
those that are not.

The counseling Cube

 Genuineness
 Empathy
 Unconditional Positive Regard

The Therapeutic Process\

 Each person has the capacity to understand the circumstances that
cause unhappiness and to reorganize his or her life accordingly
 A person’s ability to deal with these circumstances is enhanced if the
therapist establishes a warm, accepting, and understanding
relationship
Techniques
 1. Rogerian Active Listening
o “We listen for meaning”. The listener says very little but conveys
empathy, acceptance, and genuineness
o Counselor silence helps focus therapeutic responsibility on the
client
o Nonverbal dimensions: counselor’s eye contact, body language,
vocal tone, speech rate, physical space
 2. Reflection of Feeling
o Provides a mirroring of the feeling or emotion present in a client’s
statements
o Place the emphasis on feelings rather than on content and to
help clients own their feelings
o E.g.
o “You really hate her guts”
o “it really hurts when those you love most reject you”
o “You are uncomfortable being around him because he makes
you feel guilty about your achievements”
 3. Paraphrasing
o Restating the client’s fundamental message in similar but fewer
words
o Objectives: for therapists to test their understanding of what the
client has said; to communicate to your clients that you
understand their basic message
o Therapist should do the ff:
 Listen for the client’s basic message
 Restate to the client a concise and simple summary of his
of her basic message
 Observe a client cue, or ask for a client response that
confirms or denies the accuracy and helpfulness of the
paraphrase for promoting client understanding
 Activity 1: Essay

Instruction: Using the space provided below, describe the three humanistic
counseling approaches in terms of their view of human nature.
 Differentiation

Instruction: Using the SmartArt graphic below, differentiate the three

humanistic counseling approaches.

Humanistic
Counseling
Approaches
 Counseling Approach Evaluation

Instruction: Select one among the three Humanistic counseling approaches

and evaluate such approach in terms of its research evidence.

Counseling Approach:

Research 1: Abstract

Research 2: Abstract

Research 3: Abstract

Synthesis/Conclusion: